The Duck of Minerva

Yes. Only two days after Human Rights Watch launched its "preemptive call" to ban the development and deployment of such systems, the US Defense Department doubled down with a document (shorter version here) that claims: "Autonomous and semi-autonomous weapons systems shall be designed to allow commanders and operators to exercise appropriate levels of human judgment over the use of force." Comforting? On the surface this sounds like a nod to the idea that human judgment is crucial in lethal targeting decisions in war and cannot be outsourced to machines. Spencer Ackerman seems to think so:...

Today,  Human Rights Watch (HRW) released a new report, Losing Humanity: The Case Against Killer Robots, becoming the most influential NGO to date to join an emerging call for a preemptive norm against the deployment of autonomous weapons. The International Committee for Robot Arms Control, an association of scientists and philosophers, proposed such a norm back in 2010 at a meeting in Berlin; the outgoing President of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), Jakob Kellenberger, issued a statement in September 2011 suggesting the organization remained seized of developments in...

Below, the latest volley in the blog wars between the Human Security Report Project authors and their critics. _______________________________ Guest Post by Andrew Mack We thank Amelia Hoover Green, Dara Kay Cohen and Elizabeth Jean Wood (henceforth GCW) for their thoughtful critique of the Human Security Report’s analysis of the impact of war on the incidence of sexual violence. As we made clear in the Report, we believe that Dara Cohen’s dataset, which relies on State Department reports on human rights violations, makes an important contribution to our understanding of wartime sexual...

Guest Post by Andrew Mack, Human Security Report Project. We obviously agree with Megan Mackenzie’s affirmation that the mainstream narrative on wartime sexual violence ignores sexual violence against males and domestic sexual violence––even though the latter is far more prevalent than rape by combatants. With respect to other claims in her review of our just-released Human Security Report we disagree: We did not “revive” the “war is declining” thesis about inter-state conflict —the focus of successive Human Security Reports has been all conflicts—the overwhelming majority of which are...

My 10-year-old nugget, who by the way is now also a political commentator you can follow on Twitter, was asking about the official trailer for the new Ender's Game movie - partly because he's inspired by the idea of kids using online media to effect political discourse. Unfortunately there is no trailer since the release date is still a year away. Instead here is (allegedly) Orson Scott Card's favorite of the many, many fan trailers. See how many sci-fi clips you can identify! Winner gets an official tweet from LiamCS10.